We at ESI have been working on Montenegro since 1999. In June 2006 it became Europe's newest state. But, if you want to know anything about the country, we realised that there are hardly any good, up to date and accessible books about it. And then, luckily, along came Elizabeth Roberts and her major work: Realm of the Black Mountain: A History of Montenegro. We think it is a very interesting and comprehensive work about one of Europe's least known countries and have teamed up with the publisher Hurst to bring you a series of extracts from it. Montenegro has an extraordinary amount of history, some of it pretty bloody, so our extracts are only snapshots. If you want the whole picture, you will need to read the book!

Elizabeth Roberts is a former Australian diplomat who lived in Belgrade in the 1990s and has taught Balkan history at universities in Ireland and lectured in the United States and the UK She has been an expert witness to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and has contributed articles to The World Today (the Chatham House journal), the Scotsman, Oxford Analytica and the British Army Review.

Read what the critics have said about Realm of the Black Mountain. They include reviews from the Economist, the Spectator (Simon Sebag Montefiore), the Guardian (Tim Garton Ash) and one in the TLS by Chris Patten, the former European Commissioner for external relations and now Chancellor of Oxford University.